The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
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40 free The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Benjamin Franklin began writing down his life in 1771 and never finished it, yet the fragment he left became one of the most widely read memoirs in the English language. It follows a tradesman's boy from Boston who runs away at seventeen, works his way into a trade of his own, and ends up advising governors and army commanders. This quiz covers the book the way classes and book clubs read it: the Boston childhood and apprenticeship, the arrival in Philadelphia, the eighteen months in London, the printing house and the newspaper, the famous list of virtues with the daily self-examination that went with it, and the civic schemes and frontier duties of the later chapters. A few questions deal with how the manuscript came to be written and published. It is written for students revising the text, for teachers who want a ready check on the reading, and for anyone curious how much of Franklin's own account they remember. Every answer comes with a short explanation taken from his pages.
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Q 01What did a hungry 17-year-old Benjamin Franklin carry under each arm on his first walk up Market Street?
A puffy bread roll
A puffy bread roll under each arm, and a third in his mouth, was what three pennies bought him. Once full, he gave the two spare rolls to a woman and her child who had shared his boat.
Q 02What did Benjamin Franklin advise a militia chaplain to hand out just after prayers so the soldiers would attend?
Rum
Rum was already owed to the men, a gill a day, so Franklin suggested the chaplain serve it himself. Never, he writes, were prayers more generally and more punctually attended.
Q 03Which fish, fried on a boat becalmed off Block Island, tempted young Benjamin Franklin to give up his vegetable diet?
Cod
Cod smelt too good to resist, and Franklin recalled that the big fish had smaller fish in their stomachs. If they ate one another, he reasoned, he saw no reason why he should not eat them.
Q 04What did young Benjamin Franklin push through Philadelphia's streets himself to show he was not above his business?
A wheelbarrow
A wheelbarrow loaded with the paper he had just bought was Franklin's advertisement. He writes that he took care not only to be industrious and frugal in reality, but to avoid looking otherwise.
Q 05To win over a hostile member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Benjamin Franklin asked the man to lend him what?
A rare book
A rare book, borrowed and returned within a week with a grateful note, turned the opponent into a friend for life. Franklin's maxim: someone who has done you one kindness will readily do you another.
Q 06Which dish did printer Samuel Keimer send for, and finish before his guests came, to end a meatless pact with Franklin?
A roast pig
A roast pig ended three months of meatless living that Franklin had talked his employer into. Keimer had invited Franklin and two women friends to dine, but ate the whole before they came.
Q 07What did Benjamin Franklin do when Governor Thomas offered him a patent on the Pennsylvania fireplace he had invented?
Declined it
Declined it: Franklin held that, since we enjoy the inventions of others, we should share our own freely. A London ironmonger then patented a copy and, Franklin was told, made a little fortune.
Q 08Benjamin Franklin and a friend learned Italian by letting the winner of which game set the loser grammar tasks?
Chess
Chess was eating into his study time, so Franklin refused to play unless the victor could impose a task in grammar or translation. Evenly matched, the two beat each other into the language.
Q 09The first part of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography takes the form of a 1771 letter addressed to which relative?
His son
His son is the reader greeted in the opening line. Franklin did not mean this part for print: he was setting down family anecdotes during a week of leisure in the English countryside.
Q 10In Franklin's Autobiography, a man worn out from turning the grindstone decides he likes which imperfect tool best?
A speckled axe
A speckled axe would do once the buyer learned how much grinding a mirror-bright one would cost him. Franklin tells it against himself, having been almost ready to settle for a faulty character.
Q 11At ten, Benjamin Franklin was taken from school to help in his father's Boston shop, making which goods?
Candles and soap
Candles and soap were a trade Josiah Franklin took up only after emigrating, because dyeing would not feed his family. Benjamin cut wicks, filled moulds, ran errands and disliked all of it.
Q 12Which calling did young Benjamin Franklin long for, alarming a father who had already seen one child run off to it?
Sailor
Sailor was the life the boy wanted, living near the harbour and good with boats. His brother Josiah had already gone that way, so their father walked him round the workshops of Boston to find a trade ashore.
Q 13Josiah Franklin sent eight-year-old Benjamin to grammar school, meaning to devote him to which profession?
Q 21Which Pennsylvania governor sent the teenage Benjamin Franklin to London on promised letters of credit that never came?
Sir William Keith
Sir William Keith wished to please everybody and, Franklin writes, having little to give, he gave expectations. In London a friend told Franklin that nobody who knew the governor depended on him.
Q 22London pressmen gave the young Benjamin Franklin which nickname because he would not join them in drinking beer?
The Water-American
The Water-American carried a heavy form of type in each hand while the beer-drinkers managed one with both. Franklin talked many of them into trading their breakfast pint for hot gruel.
Q 23Which skill did Benjamin Franklin show off between Chelsea and Blackfriars, and nearly stay in London to teach?
The clergy
The clergy was to receive Benjamin as his father's tithe to the Church. The plan died when Josiah weighed the cost of college against the poor living many graduates went on to make.
Q 14Which book so pleased the boy Benjamin Franklin that his first savings went on its author's collected works?
Pilgrim's Progress
Pilgrim's Progress led him to buy John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes. He later sold the set to pay for forty or fifty cheap chapbooks of history.
Q 15Benjamin Franklin's brother had the boy write and sell a street ballad about the taking of which pirate?
Blackbeard
Blackbeard, whom Franklin also calls Teach, was the villain of the second of his two ballads. He later judged his ballads wretched stuff, and his father warned him that verse-makers were generally beggars.
Q 16Benjamin Franklin taught himself prose style by rebuilding essays from short notes out of which London periodical?
The Spectator
The Spectator, Addison and Steele's London essay journal, reached him as one odd volume. He jotted hints of each sentence, set them aside for days, rebuilt the essay in his own words, then compared.
Q 17After reading Xenophon, young Benjamin Franklin dropped blunt contradiction to argue in the manner of which philosopher?
Socrates
Socrates became his model: Franklin put on the manner of a humble inquirer and doubter. He found it safest for himself and very embarrassing to the people he used it against.
Q 18Which Boston newspaper, started by Benjamin Franklin's brother, unknowingly printed the teenager's anonymous essays?
The New England Courant
The New England Courant ran the pieces after Franklin disguised his handwriting and slid them under the printing-house door at night. He then listened as the regulars guessed at some learned author.
Q 19Where did the worn-out runaway Benjamin Franklin fall fast asleep on his first morning in Philadelphia?
A Quaker meeting
A Quaker meeting, silent that morning, let him doze until it broke up and someone kindly roused him. The meeting-house was, he notes, the first house he was in, or slept in, in the city.
Q 20Who stood at her father's door on Market Street and thought the newly arrived Benjamin Franklin looked ridiculous?
His future wife
His future wife, Miss Read, was the onlooker, and Franklin was soon lodging in her father's house. They married in 1730, after his London years and her unhappy match with a potter named Rogers.
Swimming
Swimming, with feats on and under the surface, won him an offer to coach a great man's boys. Franklin reckoned that a school for it in London might have earned him a good deal of money.
Q 24Which would-be poet sailed to London with Benjamin Franklin in 1724 and left owing him about twenty-seven pounds?
James Ralph
James Ralph left his family behind in Philadelphia and lived on Franklin's London wages. Franklin wrote that he loved him notwithstanding, for his many amiable qualities.
Q 25What did Benjamin Franklin call the Friday-evening club for mutual improvement he formed among his Philadelphia friends?
The Junto
The Junto had each member bring queries on politics or natural philosophy, and read an essay of his own every three months. The name is a Spanish term for a group combined in intrigue.
Q 26Which newspaper did Benjamin Franklin take over for a trifle from his failing rival Samuel Keimer?
The Pennsylvania Gazette
The Pennsylvania Gazette had at most ninety subscribers when Keimer gave up on it after nine months. In Franklin's hands it proved, within a few years, extremely profitable.
Q 27Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography borrows which printer's term for the mistakes of his life he would like to correct?
Errata
Errata is his word for wrongs such as neglecting Miss Read while he was in London. He says he would gladly live his life again if, like an author, he could fix the faults in a second edition.
Q 28What does Benjamin Franklin call his first project of a public nature, begun in Philadelphia with fifty paying members?
A subscription library
A subscription library let fifty members pool forty shillings each for volumes none could afford alone. Franklin calls it the mother of all the North American subscription libraries.
Q 29Benjamin Franklin's anonymous 1729 pamphlet urged Pennsylvania to issue more of what, which he was then hired to print?
Paper money
Paper money was opposed by the rich, who had no writer able to answer him, so the measure carried. Friends in the House rewarded Franklin with the printing, a very profitable job.
Q 30What luxury did Mrs. Franklin slip onto her husband Benjamin's breakfast table, at a cost of twenty-three shillings?
A china bowl and silver spoon
A china bowl and silver spoon replaced his twopenny earthen porringer and pewter spoon. Her only excuse was that her husband deserved them as much as any of his neighbours.